Everything We Know About Titan

Seeing as how Titan has become "the next big thing" for people to talk about, and discuss, I figured we needed a sticky topic that had everything we know about Blizzard's next MMO in a single thread for people to talk about. Seeing as how all MoP discussions got its own thread, maybe this can get one too.
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What is Titan

Titan is Blizzard's un-officially announced next gen MMO. It has been confirmed that Titan is not the name of the game yet rather just a code name used to disguise the mmo which Blizzard usually does with their popular games. Starcraft II was given the code name Medusa, Diablo III was named Hydra and now their next MMO being code named Titan.

History of Titan

We first learned about about Blizzard developing a new project called Titan when in 2007 users on Blizzard's website discovered job listings for character and environment artists to work on as labled "Next-Gen MMO". Blizzard has yet to confirm how long the project has been in development but it could be as early as 2006. It was later confirmed by a Blizzard community representative that these job listings were in fact for their un-announced title. We later learned of more evidence of Titan in 2010 when supposedly a since fired Blizzard China executive leaked a product slate of all various projects Blizzard was working on as well as suggested release dates.

While at first glance this was thought to be fake, most of the information listed on product slate indeed turned out to be semi-accurate aside from many delays on Diablo III and the World of Warcraft movie. Though "Titan" was listed on the product slate, it did not tell us anything about what it was. Lots of speculation arose and rumors ran rapid for several months.

It was later confirmed by Frank Pearce (founding member of Blizzard and senior vice president of product development) in an interview at the 2010 VGAs that and I quote,

"Titan is... the media is not meant to know anything about that. It's our next gen MMO and we've only started talking about it in a limited fashion because we want to leverage the fact that we're working on something like that for the purpose of recruiting – getting some of the best talent in the industry on that."

(Titan interivew goes from 0:08 to 0:30)

After that interview we knew that Titan was in fact a new IP and not related to World of Warcraft in any way.

What Could Titan Be?

Since the leak of Titan, many rumors and speculations have flooded the internet all trying to figure out what kind of MMO Titan could be, specifically the setting and story of the game.

- One of the first rumors that came up was a Halo MMO. Reasons for these speculations became semi interesting when it was learned that Activision-Blizzard had partnered with Bungie (creators of the halo series). These rumors though were quickly put to rest as when Microsoft split with Bungie in 2007, it was learned Microsoft gained all rights to the Halo IP making the idea of a Halo MMO irrelevant; and with Halo 4, 5 and 6 in the works, the chance of a Halo MMO being Titan is slim to none.

- More rumors arose when some people put 2 and 2 together and realized that "Titan" was the name of Ensemble's cancelled Sci-Fi MMO. Ensemble Studios was a well known video game developer best know for their game Age of Empires and Halo Wars. The company was disbanded in 2009. It has become popularly stated that Titan will be a Sci-Fi oriented MMO, thought little to no evidence shows the statements to be true.

When Is Titan Coming?

In 2011 in an interview with Gamasutra, Sams stated that "Titan was now playable. He also went on to say he visions Titan to be still going strong even in the next 10-20 years having raised the bar for the gaming industry. In September of 2012 it was learned that the development team for Titan had grown from just a few people to over 100 since 2007. Rob Pardo, Blizzard's vice president of game design said that Titan was in the "middle" of development states at this point.

Going off of everything we know including the information from the leaked product slate, it was rumored that Titan will be announced at Blizzard's 2013 Blizzcon event. It is often speculated that part of the reason that Blizzcon 2012 was canceled was to focus more time on Titan, this including going off of Blizzard's official announcement to put more time into SC2 HOTS and Mists of Pandaria.

Knowing that that Titan is currently in the middle stages of development as of September 2012 and assuming the estimation of product slate was and still is Q4 2013, we could potentially see the release of titan as early as Q1 2014.

Titan vs. World of Warcraft

Going off of what the leaked product slate shows us, though it should be taken with a grain of salt, it appears that Titan and World of Warcraft's 5th expansion will come out around the same time.

Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard has stated in an interview that Titan and World of Warcraft would be able to "co-exist" and that the games would not compete being two completely different games.

Will you play both games if you like both?
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This information was compiled from various websites and articles and written from scratch here on MMO-Champion by GamerLCD.

To kill all those "wow in the future universe" rumors, I want to say that Blizzard devs mentioned there will be product placement advertising in the game, this means there will be mentions here and there about real life products, while not being blatantly out of place with the game's lore/universe.

This means one thing: the universe is based on futuristic Earth, being a lot like Fallout or, more blizzardian-starcraft style, some sort of Borderlands-like universe.

Aren't there rumours it will be about time travel? To paraphrase when one fan asked if the setting would be "historical, futuristic, modern ect." a blizzard rep said, "all of them combined." Which suggests time travel, as does the talk of it appealing to a wider audience (encompasses multiple genres.). My thoughts:

Set on Earth, but perhaps where there are hidden magical creatures and stuff.
Will start in the near future, which will act as the main hub for players and feature the in-game adds.
The ingame adds will negate the need for subscription fees.
Players will join some type of time travel agency, involving some sort of time spanning assassin's creed esque conspiracy.

Well if I had to judge by genre + popularity + uniqueness. It's going to be a MMO, unlikely to be fantasy. I wonder if it could be a sci-fi FPS MMO styled game like that one named "Huxley" that I heard about for a while then never again. Other ideas is that it could be some kind of horror game MMO that is scary and has zombies and vampires and other undead vs hunters of those undead.

I don't believe that Titan will be the next big thing. It's just going to be something different. No doubt people will hype it off the map then be disappointed when it doesn't fulfil their vastly inappropriate expectations.

I don't believe that Titan will be the next big thing. It's just going to be something different. No doubt people will hype it off the map then be disappointed when it doesn't fulfil their vastly inappropriate expectations.

It will definitely be the next big thing for Blizzard it will be their new flag ship game; and if Mike M is saying it will last 20 years or more then I guess it deserves to be hyped.

I can only say one thing about Titan: I hope they'll have a good PvP system, and kind of balanced classes. (even if there will never be a 'true' balance) The PvP system in World of Warcraft right now is trash, but this is just my opinion, the opinion of someone who mains Disc Priest.

I'm really hoping Blizzard can give us another great gem with Titan. With the disappointment among Diablo 3's fanbase and the slow decline of what's become World of Warcraft today, it shouldn't be too difficult for them.

All of these MMO's are trying to steal the crown and crowd the market, and inevitably fail with their recycled formulas. Let's hope Blizzard doesn't make the same mistake. I really want to just lose myself in another game as I did WoW.

I'm yet to find that feeling again. So far..

This thread won't get nearly as much attention as it should being in the VG discussions.